Where might I be missing out on Gold?

My professions are Engineering/Enchanting. I cannot seem to make any good gold. I'd like to stick to these two professions because I like them the best (from a "lore" perspective, I suppose).

I cannot make any money scrolling enchants. Our AH has scrolls up for less than material costs.
I cannot make money selling Iceblade Arrows. Less than material costs. Not sure where to farm massive Shadows, anyways.
Tips on my server are generally 10g and come once every 20 mins if that, for Enchanting.

Etc... etc...

So can you smart people fill me in? What else, or how better, might I be making some gold with Engi/Enchant?

Try "playing" the AH. Make a new toon and send him 1k gold. buy gems when they are low (say around 70-75g) and then get a guild mate to cut them into popular cuts (such as str/agi/SP) - post these on Wed/Thurs afternoons/nights a little below the market price - you can generally make ~20g per gem this way. There is plenty of little "sub-markets" on the AH that you can make money off, all you need it 30 mins a day and the "auctioneer" addon.

ELSE

Your an enchanter, run old world dungeons and DE everything that drops. lvl 60 mats go for alot.

Most of my money comes from questing. Not so much the quest rewards, but the greens and other items that drop. If it's not grey, it can be sold on the AH.

Essence of air etc sell for a lot. I suppose you could farm these things. People levelling their crafts are often missing Vanilla mats.

Generally get Auctioneer and scan the AH once a day for a few weeks. You then have a table of how much items are worth (that comes up on item tooltips), so when you're out and about you know what you can sell.

Can't speak for enchanting but it's perfectly possible to make thousands and thousands from engineering. Make the pets and sell them for a low profit. For example I can make a Lil' Smoky for a maximum of 32g32s and sell at 67g25s. I set maximum prices for what I'll pay for the mats and keep the margins low enough to encourage quick sells. Of the 5 vanity pets I can make, I sell between 10 and 20 per day at a profit of between 7g36s (Mechanical Squirrel Box) to 60g46s50c (Tranquil Mechanical Yeti).

Add to those all the various parts that other trades need sometimes like Khorium Power Core, Mithril Casing, Volatile Blasting Trigger, Bronze Framework, etc. I even sell these to other engineers who can't be arsed to farm or scrape the AH for the mats themselves.

Shatter Rounds are cheaper to make and sell just as well as the alternative. Consider switching your engineering speciality. Also, smoke flares sell well (probably 20 stacks a week at 10g each per stack).

The bigger sells such as Nesingwary 4000 are no longer there because they're outdated now, but I made tens of thousands out of selling those. At the moment engineering offers small margins but with a bit of research, time and effort, you can still make reasonable amounts of gold.

---------- Post added 2010-09-06 at 01:39 PM ----------

Oh, and if you're not confident playing the AH, or find the 'big earners' such as enchanting and jewelcrafting too crowded on your server, check whether Tailoring will offer a good return. An hour a day scraping the AH and crafting to make low level (vanilla and BC) cloth equipment and bags can make serious gold.

There is no quick or easy way to make gold unless you have a lot of gold to begin with. If you're serious about wanting to make gold, you will need to put some effort in. Research. Test the market. Check your margins. Get the right addons to scrape the AH (auctioneer is great but is overly-complicated, there are others like Quick Auctions, etc).

Selling mechano-hogs. I just started doing that sold one for 14k to a guildmember and one for 15k, within a week. They are in the AH for 18k and will probably sell for that much but it will take a lot of time.

The materials cost between 13.5k and 13.8k and if you are good you can get them for even lower price I think. Making them costs like 5 minutes work and I just spam trade once in a while when I am waiting for groups or whatever. 1800g for 10 minutes work. The problem is you can probably not sell 10 at the same time but that depends on your realm. And you need 12.5k gold for getting the NPC mats that only engineers can get because no one is going to give you that gold so you can make one for them.
It's at least something but not as good as having JC and Inscriptions.

Selling mechano-hogs. I just started doing that sold one for 14k to a guildmember and one for 15k, within a week. They are in the AH for 18k and will probably sell for that much but it will take a lot of time.

The materials cost between 13.5k and 13.8k and if you are good you can get them for even lower price I think. Making them costs like 5 minutes work and I just spam trade once in a while when I am waiting for groups or whatever. 1800g for 10 minutes work. The problem is you can probably not sell 10 at the same time but that depends on your realm. And you need 12.5k gold for getting the NPC mats that only engineers can get because no one is going to give you that gold so you can make one for them.
It's at least something but not as good as having JC and Inscriptions.

This is a bad idea. Only make these for tips, don't make it and try to sell them. When people see something for 18k, they research it and find out that it only costs 12.5k from the vendor, then another 1000 or so for the other stuff. Then they aren't willing to pay the 4-5k extra you're charging, and you're screwed.

Originally Posted by HoX

dont buy any more stuff repair not so often and dont buy ah stuff and sell all you have (no gear ofc lol xD)!!

While not buying stupid stuff is good for making money, it's also good in general. By not repairing often, he means don't die often. Selling all you have can be a bad idea too. I've sold many things that I've regretted selling because I end up needing them later for an alt or something. That said, bag space is more important than cheap items.

My professions are Engineering/Enchanting. I cannot seem to make any good gold. I'd like to stick to these two professions because I like them the best (from a "lore" perspective, I suppose).

I cannot make any money scrolling enchants. Our AH has scrolls up for less than material costs.
I cannot make money selling Iceblade Arrows. Less than material costs. Not sure where to farm massive Shadows, anyways.
Tips on my server are generally 10g and come once every 20 mins if that, for Enchanting.

Etc... etc...

So can you smart people fill me in? What else, or how better, might I be making some gold with Engi/Enchant?

Thanks.

With engineering you can farm a lot of gold actually. Just make a Zapthrottle Mote Extractor... it's a BC recipe if I recall it correctly and make an engineering goggle. Any of the lvl 80 goggles will do. And then all you have to do is to farm gas clouds. There are a lot of them in Sholazar Basin and Icecrown. You'll need the goggles tho to spot them.
Hope it was helpful

Just make a Zapthrottle Mote Extractor... it's a BC recipe if I recall it correctly and make an engineering goggle.

You no longer need the goggles - just having the Zapthrottle Mote Extractor in your bags will display gas clouds on the minimap.
If you are an engineer and miner, a few circuits of Sholazar basin will get you loads of mats.

My idea for making gold is simple: Do NOT do the highest gold/hour
thing. It will make you bored, and you will not do it, so you end
up broke again. Do lots of different thing, that are fun or atleast
not boring, like Heroics (100g per run), Wintergrasp (200g when the
quests are up), crafting, grinding etc. If you keep it varied, you
will keep doing it, and you income will be greater than your expenses.
This idea has netted me 100k now over the last year, and i haven't done
anything boring to earn it.

Do you have any good ideas? Spamming my trade in Dalaran doesn't yeild much, and as I said above, scrolling enchants loses money on my server. :|

Have you tried soloing instances and DEing at all? Have you checked for EVERY useful enchant (both high level and low level because there's also demand on stuff like Crusader etc.) to see if it really happens on every single one at the AH? I'm just kind of trying to guess here.

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The only problem is that you have to farm up the rep to get some of those recipes.. and if you have an alt enchanter who doesn't reaaaaallyyy care about vanilla recipes (although I should) then the 15/20 agi one wouldn't work.. Unless they changed the rep gained for timbermaw.. then i'd be all for farming the recipe
But the amount the scrolls sell for is amazing.. so It'd be a grand idea

Enchanting is a gold mine, but you can't just make scrolls from the enchants learned from the trainer. There's way too much competition and it's usually very dumb competition who don't understand that farmed mats aren't free. Also, some enchant scrolls sell for much less than mats cost because people dump these on the AH just to recoup a little bit while leveling enchanting, stay away from those.

You have to acquire recipes that not many people have. It's ECON 101 - you need barriers to entry to protect your profits. The Vanilla agility enchants from Timbermaw are a good start, and unlike the poster above me who think farming rep is a problem, that's the opportunity! By the way, Timbermaw rep is very easy to get now, I think it took me a few hours to get enough rep for the enchant they can make north of 1k gold per week alone, of course, your mileage may vary.

The absolutely best investment I made was to pick up the +29 and +30 spell power enchants. I bought them on the AH at a great price as I'm always in the AH, but knowing the profit potential of these enchants now, I would have paid 10k each for them, even if was all the gold I had. Don't take this lightly, I can make 10k profit per week just selling these two scrolls without even farming mats, just buy mats, craft and sell.

Find a crafting addon that compares the cost of the mats to the lowest selling price of the scroll, then you can focus your efforts and increase your profitability.